Bachmann’s Political Contagion

In “Contagion,” Steven Soderbergh’s film about a virus that decimates the planet, Jude Law plays a conspiracy-minded freelance video blogger who regards vaccines as scams churned out by a medical establishment interested only in profits. Instead, he claims, with no evidence, that a homeopathic treatment based on the plant forsythia cured him of the infection that was killing nearly everyone else. His comments cause a panicked stampede of pharmacies, leading to many more deaths, since healthy people inevitably mix with those who are sick.

If you think this scenario seems a bit far-fetched, read Michele Bachmann’s lips. Last night, carrying the mantle of fear and ignorance that are hallmarks of anti-vaccine activists, Bachmann denounced Texas Governor Rick Perry for mandating vaccines for schoolgirls, starting in the sixth grade, against the human papillomavirus.

“I’m offended for all the little girls and parents that didn’t have a choice,” she said. (Actually, any parent can opt out on a child’s behalf.) She said that girls who were harmed by the vaccine don’t get “a mulligan.” Later, the offended Bachmann ventured deeper into scientific illiteracy, telling Fox News that a woman had approached her after the debate and told her that she had a daughter who had “suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”

This is a particularly irresponsible way to speak, in part because it raises the memory of the deadly fiasco caused by the British physician Andrew Wakefield when he asserted that vaccines caused autism. That assertion has been withdrawn, Wakefield has been disgraced, and, after scores of studies, no correlation between vaccinations and autism has ever been found. But vaccine rates plummeted and diseases like measles and whooping cough, once nearly vanquished, came roaring back. The fear Wakefield caused has killed many children.

I wrote about the HPV vaccine and the Bush Administration’s opposition to science for this magazine in 2006. What was true then is true now: the vaccine has never been shown to interfere with the mental development of children. There is no evidence—not a study, no data, nothing—to suggest this cancer vaccine causes anything of the sort.

Perhaps it is worth remembering that HPV is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States; more than half of all Americans become infected at some point in their lives. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (C.D.C.), an estimated twenty million Americans are currently infected with HPV, and 6.2 million become newly infected each year. HPV is associated with cancers of the cervix, vagina, penis, anus, head, and neck, and with genital warts. Indeed, HPV is responsible for almost all of the twelve thousand cases of cervical cancer diagnosed in the United States annually. Cervical cancer claims the lives of three thousand seven hundred American women each year, as well as killing hundreds of thousands of women in the developing world.

There are two HPV vaccines currently available: Merck’s Gardasil and GlaxoSmithKline’s Cervarix. Both protect against the two HPV strains that cause seventy per cent of all cervical cancers. Gardasil also protects against HPV strains that are responsible for ninety-five per cent of all cases of genital warts. They are enormously effective, but the vaccines work best if girls complete a three-dose series of shots before they become sexually active. For this reason the C.D.C. recommends vaccinating girls between the ages of eleven and twelve.

And there is the rub: Michele Bachmann and other religious conservatives will tell you that a vaccine that protects against a sexually transmitted disease would only serve to encourage young people to have more sex—which they cannot abide. There is no data to support that view; studies have shown, however, that students who take abstinence pledges are less likely to use contraception when they do have sex, and less likely to seek medical treatment for S.T.D.s. They also develop S.T.D.s at the same rates as students who do not take the pledge. In fact, there is no evidence that being vaccinated has any impact on sexual behavior.

Religious conservatives have sought for some time to create a special category of illnesses: those related to sexual activity. This is absurd; viruses don’t care whom they infect. (If we had an effective AIDS vaccine, would people try to prevent young men and women from receiving it on the grounds that it would encourage them to have sex? Stay tuned.) The C.D.C. has monitored the release of the HPV vaccine carefully and found no reason to alter its initial recommendations.

It is a strange day when Rick Perry, whose outrageous claim that climate change is a hoax created by scientists should disqualify him from holding any office, appears to be the great defender of scientific literacy. But these are strange days indeed.

Photograph by Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998, and has written frequently about AIDS, T.B., and malaria in the developing world, as well as about agricultural biotechnology, avian influenza, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, and synthetic biology.